5.1.1.9 Postmodernism and Deconstructionism

Here is a new section that I really should have added back there just after the chapter on "Omphalos". It is a school of philosophy that is so difficult to talk about intelligently and coherently that I didn't really know how to approach it. The very difficulty I have in describing this phenomenon is part of what gives it power. This will be a multi-part entry. Sorry that it's out of order. But here goes:


What is Postmodernism?
Creative individuals from many disciplines popularized this political / philosophical / literary / artistic movement in post WWII Europe and America. Although influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger’s arguments against pure objectivity, it became a significant movement only after the war.

This movement gave us Dada art, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. In music, Philip Glass’s minimalist composition, Frank Gehry’s and Rem Koolhaus’s architectural responses to “glass box” skyscrapers, literary creations from Vonnegut and Burroughs all contain strong postmodernist elements. Postmodernist historian Howard Zinn helped us see our mistakes in Viet Nam. It revels in iconoclastic attacks on blandness, the status quo, conventional wisdom, ultimate “Truth”, and the accepted norm. It strongly encouraged “thinking outside the box” and finding new and personal meaning instead of accepting established explanations. Postmodernist thinking has helped usurp established common knowledge in anthropology and archeology where prejudice, dogma and tradition have historically taken tenacious handholds and have been difficult to dislodge. As convincingly argued in the book, 1491, by Charles Mann, the new evolving consensus on the arrival and culture of indigenous people in the Americas has strongly depended on revolt against established norms and accepted doctrine. James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed ends with a postmodernist chapter celebrating the uncertainty of science and knowledge. For those of us who grew up in the last third of the 20th century, we may recall our English teachers urging us to discover anew the meaning in the classics of history, rather than regurgitate the Cliff notes. Rebellion and non-conformity drove and energized it, frequently resulting in stunningly beautiful and important works, creative new insights, and introducing many new concepts and phrases into our modern lexicon (“paradigm shift”, “authenticity”, “deconstruction”, “multicultural”, “post colonial”, “cultural relativism”, "speak truth to power", etc).

So what is it, anyway? Charles Upton in The System of Antichrist wrote, “Postmodernism is the name for the general quality of our time. It holds that all worldviews are constructed by historical processes, by culture and religion, so postmodernism sees those worldviews ('tall stories') as a function of power rather than truth.”

In this context postmodernism is the notion that all ideas and beliefs can be best understood as subjective human storytelling – narratives dominated by culture and bias with no special relationship to the truth. Philosophers of science have already rooted out the flaws in such reasoning (in philosophical parlance, postmodernism confuses the exciting context of “discovery” with the context of later labor intensive “justification”). When applied to science it negates the implication of methodology and reduces all scientific research to a cultural narrative.

Without delving to how it differentiates itself from “Modernism”, and after attempting to reconcile many divergent and conflicting descriptions, it is possible to trace the outline of its tenets, though it is fundamental to Postmodernism’s nature to resist and reject all such attempts:

• There is no objective truth or reality.


• Reality is constructed by our minds and mental representations (as Kant would have it). It is only as we choose to configure it. The only reality is chaotic potential.


• All comprehensible worldviews are oppressive, and as such should be deconstructed (i.e., overturned).


• “Truth” is plural and ultimately subjective. Meaning, truth and morality do not exist objectively; rather they are constructed by the society in which we live.


• All institutions, creations, artwork and moral values are expressions of a primal will to power; the enforcement of one person’s or group's ideology on another.


• Reason is thrown out and therefore there is really no basis for debate. Fulfillment comes from submerging one’s self in the larger group and developing a radical openness to existence by refusing to impose order on life.


• Revolutionary Critique of the Existing Order – The old ‘modern’ society from the enlightenment period with its rationalism and unitary view of truth needs to be replaced with a ‘new world order.’


• “Deconstruction”, an analytical method used extensively in postmodernism, is the progressive pulverization of reality with the goal of pursuing the meaning of a text or assertion so as to undo the oppositions on which it is founded, and to show that that same foundation is fatally unstable and impossible.

I group this movement with the other instances of idealism because many postmodernists dispute the prevailing conceptions of reality. Jean Baudrillard, one of its founders, maintained that there is no such thing as reality. Everything we consider real is only a simulation, or “simulacra”. This very statement, like many others they make, reflects an internal logical inconsistency. It would require he have access to the “true” reality so as to compare it with the “simulation” to even be able to make this assertion. But if he can indeed do that, then his initial statement is false. And besides, even if there were such a thing as “true” vs “simulated” reality, who is Jean Baudrillard to tell us which is which? He would have to possess a perceptual ability that enabled him to see through the simulacra and simulations to the underlying reality so that he might compare them with such a reality, discern differences and distinctions, and thus have empirical grounds to make his pronouncements concerning them. And if he can do this, why can not we all?